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THE OLD WEST 

By Frederick Jackson Turnei 



From the Proceedings of the State Historical Societ 
Wisconsin for 1908, pagc^ 184-2^] 



Madison 

Published by the Society 

1909 




Line of the falls of the -rivers 
— *"""" line of the proclamation of 17 
xx* Indian boundary line in 1770 
• •• Line not completed. 
n«a» Lochabar treaty line ( Donelson, 177 1 ) . .- *" 

[Based in part on map by Parrand, in American Historical Review, 

x, No. 4] 



THE OLD WEST 

By Frederick Jackson Turner 



[From the Proceedings of the State Historical Society of 
Wisconsin for 1908, pages 184-233] 



Madison 

Published by the Society 

1909 



Wisconsin Historical Society 



The Old West 



By Frederic Jackson Turner 

It is not the oldest West with which this paper deals. The 
oldest West was the Atlantic coast. 1 Roughly speaking, it took 
a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial 
settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about 
a hundred miles from the coast. Indeed, some stretches were 
hardly touched' in that period. This conquest of the nearest 
wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the 
early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime sec- 
tion of the nation and made way for the new movement of west- 
ward expansion which I propose to discuss. 

In his Winning of the West, Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the 
region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the later 
eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account with an 
excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the Alleghan- 
ies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is im- 
portant to notice, however, that he is concerned' with a back- 
woods society already formed ; that he ignores the New England 
frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and does not 
recognize that there w r as a West to be won between New England 
and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested in the winning 
of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the southern half of 
the frontier folk. 



1 1 have indicated the relations between the West and the frontier, 
and the significance of the West as a moving region, in "The Sig- 
nificance of the Frontier in American History," Wis. Hist. Soc. Pro- 
ceedings, 1893, pp. 79-112; Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1893, p. 199; 
International Socialist Review, vi, 321; Bullock, Select Readings in 
Economics (Boston [1907]); also compare Atlantic Monthly, lxxviii, 
p. 289. 

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The Old West 

There is, then, a western area intermediate between the coastal 
colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and' the trans- 
AUeghany settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth 
century. This section I propose to isolate and discuss under 
the name of the Old West, and in the period from about 1676 
to 1763. It includes the back country of New England, the 
Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, the Shenan- 
doah Valley, and the Piedmont — that is, the interior or upland 
portion of the South, lying between the Alleghanies and the head 
of navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the "fall line." 3 

In this region, and in these years, are' to be found the be- 
ginnings of much that is characteristic in Western society, for 
the Atlantic coast was in such close touch with Europe that 
its frontier experience was soon counteracted', and it developed 
along other lines. It is unfortunate that the colonial back coun- 
try appealed so long to historians solely in connection with the 
colonial wars, for the development of its society, its institutions 
and mental attitude all need study. Its history has been dealt 
with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in discussions 
of special phases, such as German and Scotch Irish immigra- 
tion. The Old AVent as a whole can only be understood by 
obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by 
correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling 



2 For the settled area in 1660, see the map by Lois Mathews in 
Channing, United States (N. Y., 1905), i, p. 510; and by Albert Cook 
Myers in Avery, United States (Cleveland, 1905), ii, following p. 398. 
In Channing, ii, following p. 603, is Marion F. Lansing's map of settle- 
ment in 1760, which is on a rather conservative basis, especially the 
part showing the interior of the Carolinas. 

Contemporaneous maps of the middle of the eighteenth century, use- 
ful in studying the progress of settlement, are: Mitchell, Map of the 
British Colonies (1755); Evans, Middle British Colonies (1758); Jeffer- 
son and Frye, Map of Virginia (1751 and 1755). 

On the geographical conditions, see maps and text in Powell, 
Physiographic Regions (N. Y., 1896), and Willis, "Northern Appala- 
chians," in Physiography of the United States (N. Y., 1896), pp. 73-82, 
169-176, 196-201. 

For the line of the falls of the rivers, see map published in il- 
lustration of Professor Alvord's paper, "The British Ministry and the 
Treaty of Fort Stanwix," ante, p. 176. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

the gaps in the material for understanding the formation of its 
society. The present paper is rather a feconnoissance than a 
conquest, of the field, a programme for study of the Old West 
rather than an exposition of it. 

The Period 

The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763, 
and the beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of 
the period is marked by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the 
royal proclamation of that year forbidding settlement beyond 
the Alleghanies. By this time the settlement of the Old West 
was fairly accomplished, and new advances were soon made into 
the "Western waters" beyond the mountains and into the in- 
terior of Vermont and New Hampshire. The isolation of the 
transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doc- 
trines of the Revolutionary era during which they were formed, 
make a natural distinction between the period of which I am 
to speak and the later extension of the West. 

The beginning of my period is necessarily an indeterminate 
date, owing to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas 
which served as bases of operations in the westward advance. 
The most active movements into the Old West occurred after 
1730. But in 1676 New England, having closed the exhausting 
struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's War, could 
regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to com- 
plete her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst 
of conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her 
frontiers from New York and Canada during the French and 
Indian wars from 1690 to 1760, and under frontier conditions 
different from the conditions of the earlier Puritan colonization. 
In 1676, Virginia was passing through Indian fighting — keenest 
along the fall line, where the frontier lay — and also experienc- 
ing a social revolt which resulted in the defeat of the democratic 
forces that sought to stay the progress of aristocratic control in 
the colony. 3 The date marks the end of the period when the 
Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded as a frontier region, 
and consequently the beginning of a more special interest in the 
interior. 



•See Osgood, American Colonies (N. Y., 1907), Hi, chap. ill. 

r 186 1 



The Old West 



The Settlement of the New England Interior 

Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into 
the back country. The expansion of New England into the 
vacant spaces of its own section, in the period we have chosen 
for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society 
which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and 
which has a special significance in Western history, in that it 
was this interior New England people who settled the Greater 
New England in central and western New York, the "Wyoming 
Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the 
prairie areas of the Old Northwest. Wisconsin especially should' 
be interested in the region, for here was the source of the im- 
portant stream of Yankee influence which contributed very 
largely to our own State, and helped mould its society and ideals 
in its early years. It is important to realize that the Old West 
included interior New England. 

The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth 
century is indicated by the Massachusetts act of 1694 enumerat- 
ing eleven towns, then on the frontier and exposed to raid's, 
none of which might be voluntarily deserted without leave of 
the governor and council, on penalty of loss of their freeholds 
by the landowners, or fine of other inhabitants. The towns 
were mostly in what is now the eastern part of New England; 
among them were Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable, Chelmsford. 
Groton, Lancaster, Marlboro, and Deerfield. A similar act in 
1700 added Brookfidd, Mendon, and Woodstock, with an inner 
frontier through Salisbury, Andover, Billerica, Hatfield, Had- 
ley. Westfield, and Northampton. 4 

Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially gar- 
risons, or "mark colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the 
town, and obliged in spite of their poverty to bear the brunt of 
Indian attack, their hardships are illustrated in the manly but 
pathetic letters of Deerfield 's minister, Mr. Williams, 5 in 1704. 



* Massachusetts Records (Boston, 1853), i, p. 194; Winsor, Narrative 
and Critical Hist, of America (Boston and N. Y., 1887), v, p. 184. 
•Sheldon, Deerfield (Deerfield, Mass., 1895), 1, p. 288. 

13 [ 187 ] 



Wisconsin Historical Society 

Parkman succinctly describes the general conditions in these 
words : 6 

The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three 
hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely scat- 
tered through an almost impervious forest. * * * Even in so-called 
villages the houses were far apart, because, except on the seashore, the 
people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fenced their 
dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, 
a projecting upper story like a block house, and sometimes a flanker 
at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements 
the largest of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by 
armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors. 

Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying 
settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky 
"stations." In 1704 the assembly of New Hampshire ordered 
that every householder should provide himself with snow-shoes 
for the use' of winter scouting parties. 

In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns con- 
tinued to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the cent- 
ury, settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley 
into the Berkshires. About 1720 Litchfield was established; in 
1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington ; and in 1735 a road 
was cut and towns scon established between Westfield and these 
Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with the older exten- 
sions along the Connecticut and its tributaries. 

In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch- 
Irish settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, 
New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region 
won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there 
came also Huguenots. 7 

In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found 
their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the 
sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number Four), 
Fort Shirley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort 
Pelham (Rowe) ; while Fort Massachusetts (Adams) guarded 



"Parkman, Frontenac (Boston, 1898), p. 390; compare his descrip- 
tion of Deerfield in 1704, in Half Century of Conflict (Boston, 1898), 
i, p. 55. 

T Hanna, Scotch Irish (N. Y. and London, 1902), ii, pp. 17-24. 

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The Old West 

the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These frontier 
garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen of New 
England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman. 8 At the 
close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berkshires, 
where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield 
were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the 
fighting in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went 
forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, 
especially into Vermont and interior New Hampshire. An 
anonymous writer gives a contemporary view of the situation 
on the eve of the Revolution: 9 

The richest parts remaining to be granted are on the northern 
branches of the Connecticut river, towards Crown Point where are 
great districts of fertile soil still unsettled. The North part of New 
Hampshire, the province of Maine, and the territory of Sagadahock 
have but few settlements in them compared with the tracts yet un- 
settled. * * * 

I should further observe that these tracts have since the peace 
[i. e., 1763], been settling pretty fast: farms on the river Connecticut 
are every day extending beyond the old fort Dummer, for near thirty 
miles; and will in a few years reach to Kohasser which is nearly two 
hundred miles; not that such an extent will be one-tenth settled, but 
the new-comers do not fix near their neighbors, and go on regularly, 
but take spots that please them best, though twenty or thirty miles 
beyond any others. This to people of a sociable disposition in Europe 
would appear very strange, but the Americans do not regard the near 
neighborhood of other farmers; twenty or thirty miles by water they 
esteem no distance in matters of this sort; besides in a country that 
promises well the intermediate space is not long in filling up. Be- 
tween Connecticut river and Lake Champlain upon Otter Creek, and 
all along Lake Sacrament [George] and the rivers that fall into it, 
and the whole length of Wood Creek, are numerous settlements made 
since the peace. 10 

For nearly a hundred' years, therefore, New England com- 
munities had been pushed out to new frontiers in the intervals 
between the almost continuous wars with the French and In- 

• Half Century of Conflict, ii, pp. 214-234. 

• American Husbandry (London, 1775), i, p. 47. 

10 For the extent of New England settlements in 1760, compared with 
1700, see the map in Channing, United States, ii, at end of volume. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

dians. Probably the most distinctive feature in this frontier 
was the importance of the community type of settlement ; in 
other words, of the towns, with their Puritan ideals in educa- 
tion, morals, and religion. This has always been a matter of 
pride to the statesmen and annalists of New England, as is il- 
lustrated by these words of Holland in his Western Massachu- 
setts, 11 commenting on the settlement of the Connecticut Valley 
in villages, whereby in his judgment morality, education, and 
urbanity were preserved: 

The influence of this policy can only be fully appreciated when 
standing by the side of the solitary settler's hut in the West, where 
even an Eastern man has degenerated to a boor in manners, where his 
children have grown up uneducated, and where the Sabbath has be- 
come an unknown day, and religion and its obligations have ceased to 
exercise control upon the heart and life. 

Whatever may be the real value of the community type of 
settlement, its establishment in New England was intimately 
connected both with the Congregational religious organization 
and with the land system of the colonies of that section, under 
which the colonial governments made grants — not in tracts to 
individuals, but in townships to groups of proprietors intending 
to settle, who in turn assigned lands to the inhabitants without 
cost. The typical form of establishing a town was as follows: 
On application of an approved body of men, desiring to estab- 
lish a new settlement, the colonial general court would appoint 
a committee to view the desired land and report on its fitness; 
an order for the grant would then issue, in varying areas, not 
far from the equivalent of six miles square. In the eighteenth 
century especially, it was common to reserve certain lots of the 
town for the support of schools and the ministry. This was the' 
origin of that very important feature of Western society, fed- 
eral land grants for schools and colleges. 12 The general courts 
also made regulations regarding the common lands, the terms 
for admitting inhabitants, etc., and thus kept a firm hand upon 
the social structure of the new settlements as they formed on 
the frontier. 



"Vol. i, p. 62. 

"Schafer, "Land Grants for Education," Univ. of Wis. Bulletin 
(Madison, 1902), chap. iv. 

r 190 1 



The Old West 

This practice, seen in its purity in the seventeenth century 
especially, was markedly different from the practices of other 
colonies in the settlement of their back lands. For during 
most of the period New England did not use her wild lands, or 
public domain, as a source of revenue by sale to individuals or 
to companies, with the reservation of quit-rents; nor attract in- 
dividual settlers by "head rights," or fifty-acre grants, after 
the Virginia type; nor did the colonies of the New England 
group often make extensive grants to individuals, on the ground 
of special services, or because of influence with the government, 
or on the theory that the grantee would introduce settlers on 
his grant. They donated their lands to groups of men who be- 
came town proprietors for the purpose of establishing commun- 
ities. These proprietors were supposed to hold the lands in 
trust, to be assigned to inhabitants under restraints to ensure 
the persistence of Puritan ideals. 

During most of the seventeenth century the proprietors 
awarded lands to the new-comers in accordance with this theory. 
But as density of settlement increased, and lands grew scarce 
in the older towns, the proprietors began to assert their legal 
right to the unoccupied lands and to refuse to share them with 
inhabitants who were not of the body of proprietors. The dis- 
tinction resulted in class conflicts in the towns, especially in the 
eighteenth century, 1 * over the ownership and disposal of the 
common lands. 

The relation of these conflicts to the settlement of the back 
country needs further investigation. They doubtless afford' one 
of the reasons why men were willing to form new towns on the 
frontier, remote from markets and exposed to Indian raids. It 
is not unlikely, also, that the system of from time to time as- 
signing unoccupied lands in the old towns unequally to the 
members of the community, according to their existing estate, 
or on some similar plan, created a desire to settle in new towns, 



13 On New England's land system see Osgood, American Colonies 
(N. Y., 1904), i, chap, xi; and Eggleston, "Land System of the New 
England Colonies," Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies (Baltimore, 1886), iv. 

Compare the account of Virginia, about 1696, in Mass. Hist. Colls. 
(Boston, 1835), 1st series, v, p. 129, for a favorable view of the New 
England town system. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

where the less-favored could find a congenial social system as 
well as lands to till. 

In any case, the new settlements, by a process of natural 
selection, would afford opportunity to the least contented 
whether because of grievances, or ambitions, to establish them- 
selves. This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns 
on the frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the 
land system began to change, that the opportunity to make new 
settlements for such reasons became common. As the economic 
and political ideal replaced the religious and social ideal, in the 
conditions under which new towns could be established, this 
became more possible. 

Such a change was in progress in the latter part of the 
seventeenth century and during the eighteenth. In 1713, 1715, 
and 1727 Massachusetts determined upon a policy of locating 
towns in advance of settlement, to protect her boundary claims. 
In 1736 she laid out five towns near the New Hampshire bor- 
der, and a year earlier opened four contiguous towns to connect 
her Housatonie and Connecticut Valley settlements. 14 Grants 
in non-adjacent regions were sometimes made to old towns, the 
proprietors of which sold them to those who wished to move. 

The history of the town of Litchfield illustrates the increas- 
ing importance of the economic factor. At a time when Con- 
necticut feared that Andros might dispose of the public lands 
to the disadvantage of the colony, the legislature granted a 
large part of western Connecticut to the towns of Hartford and 
Windsor, pro forma, as a means of withdrawing the lands from 
his hands. But these towns refused to give the lands up after 
the danger had passed, and proceeded to sell part of them. 16 
Riots occurred when the colonial authorities attempted to as- 
sert possession, and the matter was at length compromised' in 
1719 by allowing Litchfield to be settled in accordance with the 
town grants, while the colony reserved the larger part of north- 
western Connecticut. In 1737 the colony disposed of its last 



"Amelia C. Ford, Colonial Precedents of our "National Land Sys- 
tem, MS. doctor's thesis (1908), Univ. of Wis., citing Massachusetts 
Bay, House of Rep. Journal, 1715, pp. 5, 22, 46; Hutchinson, History of 
Massachusetts Bay (London, 1768), ii, p. 331; Holland, Western Mas- 
sachusetts (Springfield, 1855), pp. 166, 169. 

"Conn. Colon. Records (Hartford, 1874), viii, p. 134. 

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The Old West 

unlocated lands by sale in lots. In 1762 Massachusetts sold a 
group of entire townships in the Berkshires to the highest bid- 
ders. 16 

But the most striking illustration of the tendency, is afforded 
by the "New Hampshire grants" of Governor Wentworth, who, 
chiefly in the years about 1760, made grants of a hundred and 
thirty towns west of the Connecticut, in what is now the state 
of Vermont, but which was then in dispute between New Hamp- 
shire and New York. These grants, while in form much like 
other town grants, were disposed of for cash, chiefly to specu- 
lators who hastened to sell their rights to the throngs of land- 
seekers who, after the peace, began to pour into the Green 
Mountain region. 

It is needless to point out how this would affect the move- 
ment of Western settlement in respect to individualistic specu- 
lation in public lands ; how it would open a career to the land 
jobbers, as well as to the natural leaders in the competitive 
movement for acquiring the best lands, for laying out town sites 
and building up new communities under "boom" conditions. 
The migratory tendency of New Englanders was increased by 
this gradual change in its land policy ; the attachment to a 
locality was diminished. The later years showed increasing 
emphasis by New England upon individual success, greater re- 
spect for the self-made man who, in the midst of opportunities 
under competitive conditions, achieved superiority. The old 
dominance of town sentiment, village moral police, and tradi- 
tional class control gave way slowly. Settlement in communities 
and rooted Puritan habits and ideals had enduring influences 
in the regions settled by New Englanders; but it w T as in this 



16 Holland, Western Massachusetts, p. 197. See the comments of 
Hutchinson in his History of Massachusetts Bay, ii, pp. 331, 332. Com- 
pare the steps of Connecticut men in 1753 and 1755 to secure a land 
grant in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, for the Susquehanna Com- 
pany, and the Connecticut governor's remark that there was no un- 
appropriated land in the latter colony — Pa. Colon. Records (Harris- 
burg, 1851), v, p. 771; Pa. Archives, 2d series, xviii, contains the 
important documents, with much valuable information on the land 
system of the Wyoming Valley region. See also General Lyman's 
projects for a Mississippi colony in the Yazoo delta area — all indicative 
of the pressure for land and the speculative spirit. 

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Old AVest, in the years just before the Revolution, that individ- 
ualism began to play an important role, along with the tradi- 
tional habit of expanding in organized communities. 

The opening of the Vermont towns revealed more fully than 
before, the capability of New Englanders to become democratic 
pioneers, under characteristic frontier conditions. Their eco- 
nomic life was simple and self-sufficing. They readily adopted 
lynch law (the use of the "birch seal" is familiar to readers of 
Vermont history) to protect their land titles in the troubled 
times when these "Green Mountain boys" resisted New York's 
assertion of authority. They later became an independent Revo- 
lutionary state with frontier directness, and in very many re- 
spects their history in the Revolutionary epoch is similar to that 
of settlers in Kentucky and Tennessee, both in assertion of the 
right to independent self government and in a frontier separ- 
atism. 17 Vermont may be regarded as the culmination of the 
frontier movement which I have been describing in New Eng- 
land. By this time two distinct New T Englands existed — the 
one coastal, and dominated by commercial interests and the es- 
tablished congregational churches; the other a primitive agri- 
cultural area, democratic in principle, and with various sects 
increasingly indifferent to the fear of "innovation" which the 
dominant classes of the old communities felt. Already specu- 
lative land companies had begun New England settlements in the 
Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Missis- 
sippi ; and New England missions among the Indians, such as 
that at Stockbridge, were beginning the noteworthy religious 
and educational expansion of the section to the west. 

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south 
to north, along the river valleys, should' not conceal from us the 
fact that it was in essential characteristics a Western movement, 
especially in the social traits that were developing. Even the 
men who lived in the long line of settlements on the Maine 
coast, under frontier conditions, and remote from the older 
centres of New England, developed traits and a democratic 



" Compare Vermont's dealings with the British, and the negotiations 
of Kentucky and Tennessee leaders with Spaniards and British. See 
Amer. Hist. Review, i, p. 252, note 2, for references on Vermont's 
Revolutionary philosophy and influence. 

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The Old West 

spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite of the 
fact that Maine is "down east" by pre-eminence. 18 

The Back Country of the Middle Region 

The frontier of the middle region in this period of the forma- 
tion of the Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen 
to coincide with the colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. 
In the latter colony the trend of settlement was into the Great 
Valley, and so on to the southern uplands; while the advance 
of settlement in New York was like that of New England, 
chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River. 

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old 
West in this part of the eighteenth century. With them were 
associated the Wallkill, tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Val- 
ley near the Mohawk, along the sources of the Susquehanna. 
The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the east ; the Adirondacks 
and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk Valley pen- 
etrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians were 
too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but 
dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even 
that, could have furnished the necessary momentum for over- 
coming the Indian barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for 
the population was comparatively sparse in contrast with the 
task to be performed. What most needs discussion in the case 
of New York, therefore, is not the history of expansion as in 
other sections, but the absence of expansive power. 

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made be« 
ginnings of settlements at strategic points near the confluence of 
the Mohawk. But the fur-trader was not followed by a tide of 
pioneers. One of the most important factors in restraining 
density of population in New York, in retarding the settle- 
ment of its frontier, and in determining the conditions there, 
was the land system of that colony. 

From the time of the patroon grants along the lower Hudson, 
great estates had been the common form of land tenure. 
Rensselaerswyck reached' at one time over seven hundred thou- 
sand acres. These great patroon estates were confirmed by the 



19 See H. C. Emery, Artemas Jean Haynes (New Haven, 1908), 
pp. 8-10. 

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English governors, who in their turn followed a similar policy. 
By 1732 two and one-half million acres were engrossed in 
manorial grants. 19 In 1764, Governor Colden wrote 20 that three 
of the extravagant grants contain, 

as the proprietors claim, above a million acres each, several others 
above 200,000. * * * Although these grants contain a great part of 
the province, they are made in trifling acknowledgements. The far 
greater part of them still remain uncultivated, without any benefit to 
the community, and are likewise a discouragement to the settling and 
improving the lands in the neighborhood of them, for from the uncer- 
tainty of their boundaries, the patentees of these great tracts are daily 
enlarging their pretensions, and by tedious and most expensive law 
suits, distress and ruin poor families who have taken out grants near 
them. 

He adds that ' ' the proprietors of the great tracts are not only 
freed from the quit-rents, which the other landholders in the 
province pay, but by their influence in the assembly are freed 
from every other public tax on their lands." 

In 1769 it was estimated that at least five-sixths of the in- 
habitants of Westchester County lived within the bounds of the 
great manors there. 21 In Albany County the Livingston manor 
spread over seven modern townships, and the great Van Rens- 
selaer manor stretched twenty-four by twenty-eight miles along 
the Hudson ; while still farther, on the Mohawk, were the vast 
possessions of Sir William Johnson. 22 



"Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1897, p. 110. 
10 N. Y. Colon. Docs., vii, pp. 654, 795. 

21 Becker, in Amer. Hist. Review, vi, p. 261. 

22 Becker, loc. cit. For maps of grants in New York, see O'Callaghan, 
Doc. Hist, of N. Y. (Albany, 1850), i, pp. 421, 774; especially Southier, 
CTiorograpJiical Map of New York; Winsor, America, v, p. 236. In 
general on these grants, consult also Doc. Hist, of N. Y., i, pp. 249-257; 
N. Y. Colon. Docs., iv, pp. 397, 791, 874, v, pp. 459, 651, 805, vi, pp. 486, 
549, 743. 876, 950; Kip, Olden Time (N. Y., 1872), p. 12; Scharf, History 
of Westchester County (Phila., 1886), i, p. 91; Libby, Distribution of 
Vote on Ratification of Constitution (Madison, 1894), pp. 21-25. 

For the region of the Wallkill, including New Paltz, etc., see Eager, 
Outline History of Orange County, New York (Newburgh, 1846-47) ; and 
Ruttenber and Clark, History of Orange County (Phila., 1881), pp. 
11-20. On Cherry Valley and upper Susquehanna settlements, in gen- 

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The Old West 

It was not simply that the grants were extensive, but that the 
policy of the proprietors favored the leasing rather than the 
sale of the lands— frequently also of the stock, and taking pay- 
ment in shares. It followed that settlers preferred, to go to 
frontiers where a more liberal land policy prevailed. At one 
time it seemed possible that the tide of German settlement, 
which finally sought Pennsylvania and the up-country of the 
South, might flow into New York. In 1710, Governor Hunter 
purchased a tract m Livingston's manor and located nearly fif- 
teen hundred Palatines on it to produce naval stores. 213 But 
the attempt soon failed; the Germans applied to the Indians 
on Schoharie Creek, a branch of the Mohawk, for a grant of 
land ana migrated there, only to find that the governor had al- 
ready granted the land. Again were the villages broken up, 
some remaining and some moving farther up the' Mohawk, where 
they and accessions to their number established the frontier 
settlements about Palatine Bridge, in the region where, in the 
Eevolution, Herkimer led these German frontiersmen to stem 
the British attack in the battle of Oriskany. They constituted 
the most effective military defense of Mohawk Valley. Still an- 
other portion took their way across to the waters of the Sus- 
quehanna, and at Tulpehockon Creek began an important centre 
of German settlement in the Great Valley of Pennsylvania. 2 * 
The most important aspect of the history of the movement 
into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the 
evidence which it afforded that in the competition for settle- 
ment between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land, 
those which imposed' feudal tenures and undemocratic restraints, 
and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose. 

eral, in New York, see Halsey, Old New York Frontier, pp. 5, 119, and 
the maps by De Witt and Southier in O'Callaghan, Doc. Hist, of N. Y., 
i, pp. 421, 774. 

Note the French Huguenots and Scotch-Irish in Orange County, and 
the Scotch-Irish settlers of Cherry Valley and their relation to London- 
derry, N. H., as well as the missionary visits from Stockbridge, Mass., 
to the upper Susquehanna. 

"Lord, Industrial Experiments (Baltimore, 1898), p. 45; Diffender- 
fer, German Exodus (Lancaster, Pa., 1897). 

14 See post. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a 
region for settlement, which not even the actual opportunities 
in certain parts of the colony could counteract. The diplomacy 
of New York governors during this period of the Old West, in 
securing a protectorate over the Six Nations and a consequent 
claim to their territory, and in holding them aloof from France, 
constituted the most effective contribution of that colony to the 
movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes 
were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in 
which New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was 
by the New England inundation into this interior that they 
were colonized. And it was under conditions like those prevail- 
ing in the later years of the expansion of settlements in New 
England itself, that this settlement of interior and western New 
York was effected. The result was, that New York became 
divided into two distinct peoples : the dwellers along Hudson 
Valley, and' the Yankee pioneers of the interior. But the set- 
tlement of central and western New York, like the settlement 
of Vermont, is a story that belongs with the era in which the 
trans- Alleghany West was occupied. 

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old 
West which is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migra- 
tion which occupied the southern uplands, and before entering 
upon this it will be advantageous to survey that part of the 
movement toward the interior which proceeded westward from 
the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the eastern 
edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the 
latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process 
and the significance of the movement may be better understood. 

Expansion Westward from the Southern Tidewater: 

Virginia 

About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous 
efforts were made to protect the frontier line which ran along 
the falls of the rivers, against the attacks of Indians. This 
"fall line," as the geographers call it, marking the head of 
navigation, and thus the boundary of the maritime or lowland 
South, runs from the site of Washington, through Richmond, 
and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Caro- 

f 198 1 



The Old West 

lina. Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to the inter- 
ior, found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth 
century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early 
as 1675 a statute was enacted, 25 providing that paid troops of 
five hundred men should be drawn from the midland and most 
secure parts of the country and placed on the "heads of the 
rivers" and other places fronting upon the Indians. What 
was meant by the "heads of the rivers," is shown by the fact 
that several of these forts were located' either at the falls of 
the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the lower 
Potomac in Stafford County ; one near the falls of the Rappahan- 
nock ; one on the Mattapony ; one on the Pamunky ; one on the 
falls of the James (near the site of Richmond) ; one near the 
falls of Appomattox, and others on Blackwater, Nansemond, and 
the Accomac peninsula, all in the eastern parts of Virginia. 

Again, in 1679, similar provision was made, 26 and an espe- 
cially interesting act was passed, making quasi manorial grants 
to Major Lawrence Smith and Captain "William Byrd, "to seate 
certain lands at the head [falls] of Rappahannock and James 
river" respectively. This scheme failed for lack of approval 
by the authorities in England. 2,7 But Byrd at the falls of the 
James near the present site of Richmond, Robert Beverley on 
the Rappahannock, and other frontier commanders on the York 
and Potomac, continued to undertake colonial defense. The 
system of mounted' rangers was established in 1691, by which a 
lieutenant, eleven soldiers, and two Indians at the "heads" or 
falls of each great river were to scout for enemy, 28 and the 
Indian boundary line was strictly defined. 

By the opening years of the eighteenth century (1701), the 
assembly of Virginia had reached the conclusion that settlement 



"Hening, Va. Statutes at Large (N. Y., 1823), ii, p. 326. 

"Ibid., p. 433. 

"Bassett, Writings of William Byrd (N. Y., 1901), p. xxi. 

^Hening, iii, p. 82. Similar acts were passed almost annually in 
successive years of the seventeenth century; cf. loc. cit., pp. 98, 115, 
119, 126, 164; the system was discontinued in 1722 — see Beverley, Vir- 
ginia and its Government (London, 1722), p. 234. 

It is interesting to compare the recommendation of Governor Dodge 
for Wisconsin Territory in 1836 — see "Wis. Terr. House of Reps. 
Journal, 1836, pp. 11 et seq. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

would be the best means of protecting the frontiers, and that 
the best way of "settling in cohabitations upon the said land 
frontiers within this government will be by encouragements to 
induce societies of men to undertake the same. " 29 It was de- 
clared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men 
in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant to 
be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor 
more than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held 
in common by the society. The power of ordering and manag- 
ing these lands, and the settling and planting of them, was to 
remain in the society. Virginia was to pay the cost of survey, 
also quit- rents for the first twenty years for the two-hundred- 
acre tract as the site of the "cohabitation." Within this two 
hundred acres each member was to have a half -acre lot for liv- 
ing upon, and a right to two hundred acres next adjacent, until 
the thirty thousand acres were taken up. The members of the 
society were exempt from taxes for twenty years, and from the 
requirements of military duty except such as they imposed upon 
themselves. 

"Provided alwayes, " ran the quaint statutes, "and it is the 
true intent and meaning of this act that for every five hundred 
acres of land to be granted in pursuance of this act there shall 
be and shall be continually kept upon the said land one chris- 
tian man between sixteen and sixty years of age perfect of limb, 
able and fitt for service who shall alsoe be continually provided 
with a well fixed musquett or fuzee, a good pistoll, sharp 
simeter, tomahawk and five pounds of good clean pistoll powder 
and' twenty pounds of sizable leaden bulletts or swan or goose 
shott to be kept within the fort directed' by this act besides the 
powder and shott for his necessary or useful shooting at game. 
Provided also that the said warlike christian man shall have 
his dwelling and continual abode within the space of two hun- 
dred acres of land to be laid out in a geometricall square or as 
near that figure as conveniency will admit," etc. Within two 
years the society was required to cause a half acre in the middle 
of the "cohabitation" to be palisaded "with good sound pal- 
lisadoes at least thirteen foot long and six inches diameter in 



Hening, iii, pp. 204-209. 

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The Old West 

the middle of the length thereof, and set double and at least 
three foot within the ground." 

Such in 1701 was the idea of the Virginia tidewater assembly 
of a frontiersman, and of the frontier towns by which the Old 
Dominion should spread her population into the upland South. 
But the "warlike christian man" who actually came to furnish 
the firing line for Virginia, was destined to be the Scotch-Irish- 
man and the German with long rifle in place of "fuzee" and 
"simeter," and altogether too restless to have his continual 
abode within the space of two hundred acres. Nevertheless 
there are points of resemblance between this idea of societies set- 
tled about a fortified town and the later "stations" of Ken- 
tucky. 30 

By the beginning of the' eighteenth century the engrossing 
of the lands of lowland Virginia had progressed so far, the 
practice of holding large tracts of wasteland for reserves in the 
great plantations had become so common, that the authorities 
of Virginia reported to the home government that the best land's 
were all taken up. 31 and settlers were passing into North Caro- 
lina seeking cheap lands near navigable rivers. Attention was 
directed also to the Piedmont portions of Virginia, for by this 
time the Indians were conquered in this region. It was now 
possible to acquire land by purchase 32 at five shillings sterling 
for fifty acres, as well as by head-rights for importation or set- 
tlement, and land speculation soon turned to the new area. 

Already the Piedmont had been somewhat explored. 33 Even 

'"Compare the law of 1779 in Va. Revised Code (1819), ii, p. 357; 
Ranck's Boonesborough (Louisville, 1901). 

"Bassett, Writings of Byrd, p. xii; Calendar of British State Papers, 
Am. and W. I., 1677-SO (London, 1896), p. 168. 

^Bassett, loc. cit., p. x, and Hening, iii, p. 304 (1705). 

83 For example, the expeditions of Abraham Wood to the Ohio by way 
of the Great Kanawha, in 1654, and the later expeditions of Lederer, 
Batt, and Lawson. Compare Va. Mag. (Richmond, 1895), ii, p. 51; 
Hening, i, pp. 357, 376, 581; Cal. British State Papers, Colonial Am. 
and W. I., 1669-74 (London, 1889), p. 270, no. 647; Edward Bland, Dis- 
covery of New Brittaine (London, 1651; and reprinted by Sabin, 
N. Y., 1873); this deals with discoveries by Bland. Captain Abraham 
Wood, and others, one hundred and twenty miles southwest from the 
falls of the Appomattox; Beverley, Virginia (London, 1722) p. 62 
(Batt); Lederer, Discoveries (Cincinnati, 1879). 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

by the middle of the seventeenth century, fur-traders had fol- 
lowed the trail southwest from the James more than four hun- 
dred miles to the Catawbas and later to the Cherokees. Col. 
"William Byrd had, as we have seen, not only been absorbing 
good lands in the lowlands, and defending his post at the falls 
of the James, like a count of the border, but he also engaged in 
this fur-trade and sent his pack trains along this trail through 
the Piedmont of the Carolinas, 34 and took note of the rich sav- 
annas of that region. Charleston traders engaged in rivalry for 
this trade. 

It was not long before cattle raisers from the older settlements, 
learning from the traders of the fertile plains and peavine past- 
ures of this land, followed the fur-traders and erected scattered 
"cow-pens" or ranches beyond the line of plantations in the 
Piedmont. Even at the close of the seventeenth century, herds 
of wild' horses and cattle ranged at the outskirts of the Virginia 
settlements, and were hunted by the planters, driven into pens, 
and branded somewhat after the manner of the later ranching 
on the Great Plains. 35 Now the cow-drivers and the cow-pens 86 
began to enter the uplands. The Indians had by this time been 
reduced to submission in most of the Virginia Piedmont — as 
Governor Spotswood 37 reported' in 1712, living "quietly on our 
frontiers, trafficking with the Inhabitants." 



34 Bassett, Writings of Byrd, pp. xvii, xviii, quotes Byrd's description 
of the trail; Logan, Upper South Carolina (Columbia, 1859), i, p. 167; 
Adair describes the trade somewhat later; cf. Bartram, Travels (Lon- 
don, 1792), passim, and Monette, Mississippi Valley (N. Y., 1846), ii, 
p. 13. 

36 Bruce, Economic Hist, of Ya. (N. Y., 1896), i, pp. 473, 475, 477. 

36 See descriptions of cow-pens in Logan, History of Upper S. C, i, 
p. 151; Bartram, Travels, p. 308. On cattle raising generally in the 
Piedmont, see: Gregg, Old Cheraws (N. Y., 1867), pp. 68, 108-110; 
Salley, Orangeburg (Orangeburg, 1898), pp. 219-221; Lawson, New 
Voyage to Carolina (Raleigh, 1860), p. 135; Ramsay, South Carolina 
(Charleston, 1809), i, p. 207; J. F. D. Smyth, Tour (London, 1784), I, 
p. 143, ii, pp. 78, 97; Foote, Sketches of N. C. (N. Y., 1846), p. 77; N. O. 
Colon. Records (Raleigh, 1887), v, pp. xli, 1193, 1223; American Hus- 
bandry (London, 1775), i, pp. 336, 350, 384; Hening, v, pp. 176, 245. 

87 Spotswood, Letters (Richmond, 1882), i, p. 167; compare Va. Mag- 
azine, Hi, pp. 120, 189. 

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The Old West 

After the defeat of the Tuscaroras and Yemassees about this 
f?l£ Carolmas, similar opportunities for expansion ex- 

isted there. The cattle drovers sometimes took their flocks from 
range to range; sometimes they were gathered permanently near 
the pens, finding the range sufficient throughout the year Thev 
were driven to Charleston, or later sometimes even to Philadel- 
phia and Baltimore markets. By the middle of the century dis- 
temper worked havoc with them in South Carolina- and de- 
stroyed seven-eighths of those in North Carolina; Virginia made 
regulations governing the driving of cattle through her frontier 
counties to avoid the disease, just as in our own time the north- 
em cattlemen attempted to protect their herds against the Texas 

Thus cattle raisers from the the coast followed the fur-traders 
toward the uplands, and already pioneer farmers were strag- 
gling into the same region, soon to be outnumbered by the tide 
of settlement that flowed into the region from Pennsylvania 

The descriptions of the uplands by contemporaneous writers 
are m glowing terms. Makemie, in his Plain and Friendly 
Persian (1705), declared: "The best, richest and most 
healthy part of your Country is yet to be inhabited, above the 
falls of every River, to the Mountains." Jones, in his Present 
State of Virgvna (1724), comments on the convenience of tide- 
water transportation, etc., but declares that section "not nearly 
so healthy as the uplands and Barrens which serve for Ranges 
for Stock, although he speaks less enthusiastically of the sav- 
annas and marshes which lay in the midst of the forest areas, 
in tact the Piedmont was by no means the unbroken forest 
that might have been imagined, for in addition to natural mead- 
ows, the Indians had burned over large tracts. 39 It was a rare 
combination of woodland and pasture, with clear running 
streams and a mild climate. 40 

"N. C. Colon. Records, v, p. xli. 

"Lawson, Carolina (Raleigh, i860), gives a description early in the 
eighteenth century; his map is reproduced in Avery, United States 
(Cleveland, 1907), iii, p. 224. 

cZu^TT***™* disadvanta ^ es of ^e Piedmont region of the 
Carolina* , the middle of the eighteenth century are illustrated in 
Spangenburg's diary, in N. C. Colon. Records, v, pp 6 7 13 14 Com 
pare American Husbandry, 1, pp. 220, 332, 357, 388. ' 

14 f 203 ] 



Wisconsin Historical Society 

The occupation of the Virginia Piedmont received a special 
impetus from the interest which Governor Spotswood took in the 
frontier. In 1710 he proposed a plan for intercepting the French 
in their occupation of the interior, by inducing Virginia settle- 
ment to proceed along one side of James River only, until this 
column of advancing pioneers should strike the attenuated line 
of French posts in the centre. In the same year he sent a body 
of horsemen to the top of the Blue Ridge, where they could over- 
look the Valley of Virginia. 41 By 1714 he became active as a 
colonizer himself. Thirty miles above the falls of the Rappa- 
hannock, on the Rapidan at Germanna, 42 he settled a little village 
of German redemptioners (who in return for having the passage 
paid agreed to serve without wages for a term of years), to en- 
gage in his iron works, also to act as rangers on the frontier. 
From here, in 1716, with two companies of rangers and four 
Indians, Governor Spotswood and a band of Virginia gentlemen 
made a summer picnic excursion of two weeks across the Blue 
Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley. Sic juvat transcendere 
m antes was the motto of these Knights of the Golden Horse 
Shoe, as Spotswood dubbed them. But they were not the "war- 
like christian men" destined to occupy the' frontier. 

Spotswood 's interest in the advance along the Rappahannock, 
probably accounts for the fact that in 1720 Spotsylvania and 
Brunswick were organized as frontier counties of Virginia. 48 
Five hundred dollars were contributed by the colony to the 
church, and a thousand dollars for arms and ammunition for 
the settlers in these counties. The fears of the French and In- 
dians beyond the high mountains, were alleged as reasons for 



41 Spotswood, Letters, i, p. 40. 

42 On Germanna see Spotswood, Letters (index); Fontaine's journal 
in A. Maury, Huguenot Family (1853), p. 268; Jones, Present State of 
Virginia (N. Y., 1865), p. 59; Bassett, Writings of Byrd, p. 356; Va. 
Magazine, xiii, pp. 362, 365, vi, p. 385, xii, pp. 342, 350, xiv, p. 136. 

Spotswood's interest in the Indian trade on the southern frontier 
of Virginia is illustrated in his fort Christanna, on which the above 
references afford information. 

The contemporaneous account of Spotswood's expedition into Shen- 
andoah Valley is Fontaine's journal, cited above. 

*» See the excellent paper by C. E. Kemper, in Va. Magazine, xii, on 
"Early Westward Movement in Virginia." 

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The Old West 

this advance. To attract settlers to these new counties, they 
were (1723) exempt from purchasing the lands under the system 
of head rights, and from payment of quit-rents for seven years 
after 1721. The free grants so obtained were not to exceed a 
thousand acres. This was soon extended to six thousand acres, 
but with provision requiring the settlement of a certain number 
of families upon the grant within a certain time. In 1729 Spots- 
wood was ordered by the council to produce "rights" and pay 
the quit-rents for the 59,786 acres which he claimed in this 
county. 

Other similar actions by the council show that large hold- 
ings were developing there, also that the difficulty of es- 
tablishing a frontier democracy in contact with the area of 
expanding plantations, was very real." By the time of the occu- 
pation of the Shenandoah Valley, therefore, the custom was 
established in this part of Virginia, 45 of making grants of a thou- 
sand acres for each family settled. Speculative planters, influ- 
ential with the governor and council secured grants of' many 
thousand acres, conditioned upon seating a certain number of 
families, and satisfying the requirements of planting. Thus 
what had originally been intended as direct grants to the actual 
settler, frequently became grants to great planters like Beverley 
who promoted the coming of Scotch-Irish and German settlers', 
or took advantage of the natural drift into the valley, to sell 
lands in their grants, as a rule, reserving quit-rents. The liberal 
grants per family enabled these speculative planters, while 
satisfying the terms of settlement, to hold large portions of the 
grant for themselves. Under the lax requirements, and prob- 
ably still more lax enforcement, of the provisions for actual cul- 
tivation or cattle-raising. 46 it was not difficult to hold such wild 
land. These conditions rendered possible the extension of a 
measure of aristocratic planter life in the course' of time to the 
Piedmont and valley lands of Virginia. It must be added, how- 
ever, that some of the newcomers, both Germans and Scotch- 
Insh^like the Van Meters, Stover, and Lewis, also showed an 

-Compare Phillips, "Origin and Growth of the Southern Black 
Belts," In Amer. Hist. Review, xi, p. 799. 
**Va. Magazine, xlil, p. 113. 
u Revised Code of Virginia (Richmond, 1819), ii, p. 339. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

ability to act as promoters in locating settlers and securing 
grants to themselves. 

In the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley, lay part of the 
estate of Lord Fairfax, some six million acres in extent, which 
came to the family by dower from the old Culpeper and Arling- 
ton grant of Northern Neck. In 1748, the youthful Washing- 
ton was surveying this estate along the upper waters of the 
Potomac, finding a bed under the stars and learning the life of 
the frontier. Lord Fairfax established his own Greenway 
manor, 47 and divided his domain into other manors, giving 
ninety-nine-year leases to settlers already on the ground at 
twenty shillings annually per hundred acres; while of the new- 
comers he exacted two shillings annual quit-rent for this amount 
of land in fee simple. Litigation kept land titles uncertain here, 
for many years. Similarly, Beverley's manor, about Staunton, 
represented a grant of 118,000 acres to Beverley and his asso- 
ciates on condition of placing the proper number of families on 
the tract. 48 Thus speculative planters on this frontier shared in 
the movement of occupation and made an aristocratic element 
in the up-country ; but the increasing proportion of Scotch-Irish 
immigrants, as well as German settlers, together with the con- 
trast in natural conditions, made the interior a different Vir- 
ginia from that of the tide-water. 

As settlement ascended the Rappahannock, and emigrants 
began to enter the Valley from the north, so, contemporaneously, 
settlement ascended' the James above the falls, succeeding to the 
posts of the fur-traders. 49 Goochland County was set off in 1728, 
and the growth of population led, as early as 1729, to proposals 
for establishing a city (Richmond) at the falls. Along the up- 
per James, as on the Rappahannock, speculative planters bought 
headrights and located settlers and tenants to hold their 
grants. 50 Into this region came natives of Virginia, emigrants 



"Mag. Amer. Hist., xiii, pp. 217, 230; Winsor, Narr. and Crit. Hist, 
of America, v, p. 268; Kercheval, The Valley (Winchester, Va., 1833), 
pp. 67, 209; Va. Magazine, xiii, p. 115. 

48 William and Mary College Quarterly (Williamsburg, 1895), 111, 
p. 226 — see Jefferson and Frye, Map of Virginia, 1751, for location of 
this and Borden's manor. 

♦•Brown, The Caoells (Boston, 1895), p. 53. 

** Loc. cit., pp. 57, 66. 

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The Old West 

from the British isles, and scattered representatives of other 
lands, some of them coming up the James, others up the York, 
and still others arriving with the southward-moving current 
along both sides of the Blue Ridge. 

Before 1730 few settlers lived' above the mouth of the Riv- 
anna. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a thousand acres at 
the eastern opening of its mountain gap, and here, under fron- 
tier conditions, Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743 near his later 
estate of Monticello. About him were pioneer farmers, as well 
as foresighted engrossers of the land. In the main his country 
was that of a democratic frontier people— Scotch-Irish Presby- 
terians, Quakers, Baptists, and other sects, 51 out of sympathy 
with the established church and the landed gentry of the low- 
lands. This society in which he was born, was to find in Jef- 
ferson a powerful exponent of its ideals. 52 Patrick Henry was 
born in 1736 above the falls, not far from Richmond, and he 
also was a mouthpiece of interior Virginia in the Revolutionary 
era. In short, a society was already forming in the Virginia 
Piedmont which was composed of many sects, of independent 
yeomen as well as their great planter leaders — a society nat- 
urally expansive, seeing its opportunity to deal in unoccupied 
lands along the frontier which continually moved toward the 
West, and in this era of the eighteenth century dominated by 
the democratic ideals of pioneers rather than by the aristocratic 
tendencies of slaveholding planters. As there were two New 
Englands, so there were by this time two Virginias, and' the 
uplands belonged with the Old West. 

North Carolina 

The advance across the fall line from the coast was, in North 
Carolina, much slower than in Virginia. After the Tuscarora 
War (1712-13) an extensive region west from Pamlico Sound 
was opened (1724). The region to the north, about the Roa- 
noke, had before this begun to receive frontier settlers, largely 
from Virginia. Their traits are interestingly portrayed in 



61 Meade, Old Churches (Phila., 1861), 2 vols.; Foote, Sketches 
(Phila., 1855); Brown, The Caoells, p. 68. 

B2 Atlantic Monthly, vol. xci, pp. 83 et seq.; Ford, Writings of Thomas 
Jefferson (N. Y., 1892), i, pp. xix et seq. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

Byrd's Dividing Line. By 1728 the farthest inhabitants along 
the Virginia boundary were frontiersmen about Great Creek, a 
branch of the Roanoke. 53 The North Carolina commissioners 
desired to stop running the line after going a hundred and sev- 
enty miles, on the plea that they were already fifty miles beyond' 
the outermost inhabitant, and there would be no need for an 
age or two to carry the line farther; but the Virginia surveyors 
pointed out that already speculators were taking up the land. 
A line from "Weldon to Fayetteville would roughly mark the 
western boundary of North Carolina's sparse population of forty 
thousand souls. 54 

The slower advance is explained, partly because of the later 
settlement of the Carolinas, partly because the Indians contin- 
ued to be troublesome on the flanks of the advancing popula- 
tion, as seen in the Tuscarora and Yemassee wars, and partly 
because the pine barrens running parallel with the fall line 
made a zone of infertile land not attractive to settlers. The 
North Carolina low country, indeed, had from the end of the 
seventeenth century been a kind of southern frontier for over- 
flow from Virginia; and in many ways was assimilated to the 
type of the up-country in its turbulent democracy, its variety 
of sects and peoples, and its primitive conditions. But under 
the lax management of the public lands, the use of "blank 
patents" and other evasions made possible the development of 
large landholding, side by side with headrights to settlers. 
Here, as in Virginia, a great proprietary grant extended across 
the colony — Lord Granville's proprietary was a zone embracing 
the northern half of North Carolina. Within this area, sales 
and quit-rents were administered by the agents of the owner, 
with the result that uncertainty and disorder of an agrarian 
nature extended down to the Revolution. There were likewise 
great speculative holdings, conditioned on seating a certain pro- 
portion of settlers, into which the frontiersmen were drifting. 55 
But this system also made it possible for agents of later migrat- 
ing congregations to establish colonies like that of the Mora- 



B3 Byrd, Dividing Line (Richmond, 1866), pp. 85, 271. 

64 N. C. Colon. Records, Hi, p. xiii. Compare Hawks, Hist, of North 
Carolina (Fayetteville, 1859), map of precincts, 1663-1729. 

"Raper, North Carolina (N. Y. 1904), chap, v; W. R. Smith, South 
Carolina (N. Y., 1903), pp. 48, 57. 

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The Old West 

vians at Wachovia. 50 Thus, by the time settlers came into the 
uplands from the north, a land system existed similar to that 
of Virginia. A common holding was a square mile (640 
acres), but in practice this did not prevent the accumulation of 
great estates. 57 Whereas Virginia's Piedmont area was to a 
large extent entered by extensions from the coast, that of North 
Carolina remained almost untouched by 1730. 58 

South Carolina 

The same is true of South Carolina. By 1730, settlement had 
progressed hardly eighty miles from the coast, even in the 
settled area of the lowlands. The tendency to engross the low- 
lands for large plantations was clear, here as elsewhere. 59 The 
surveyor-general reports in 1732 that not as many as a thousand 
acres within a hundred miles of Charleston, or within twenty 
miles of a river or navigable creek, were unpossessed. In 1729 
the crown ordered eleven townships of twenty thousand acres 
each to be laid out in rectangles, divided into fifty acres for 
each actual settler under a quit-rent of four shillings a year 
for every hundred acres, or proportionally, to be paid after the 
first ten years. 60 By 1732 these townships, designed to attract 
foreign Protestants, were laid out on the great rivers of the 
colony. As they were located in the middle region, east of the 
fall line, among pine barrens, or in malarial land's in the south- 
ern corner of the colony, they all proved abortive as towns, 
.except Orangeburg 61 on the North Edisto, where German re- 
demptioners made a settlement. The Scotch-Irish Presbyterians 



""Clewell, Wachovia (N. Y., 1902). 

"Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1897, pp. 120, 121, citing 
Bassett, in Law Quarterly Review, April, 1895, pp. 159-161. 

68 See map in Hawks, North Carolina. 

■"McCrady, South Carolina, 1719-1776 (N. Y., 1899), pp. 149, 151; 
Smith, South Carolina, p. 40; Ballagh, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 
1897, pp. 117-119; Brevard, Digest of S. C. Laws (Charleston, 1857), 
i, p. xi. 

60 McCrady, South Carolina, pp. 121 et seq.; Phillips, Transportation 
in the Eastern Cotton Belt (N. Y., 1908), p. 51. 

61 This was not originally provided for among the eleven towns. For 
its history see Salley, Orangeburg — frontier conditions about 1769 are 
described on pp. 219 et seq.; see map opposite p. 9. 

r 209 1 



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who came to Williamsburg, on Black River, suffered hardships; 
as did the Swiss who, under the visionary leadership of Purry, 
settled in the deadly climate of Purrysburg, on the lower Savan- 
nah. To Welsh colonists from Pennsylvania there was made a 
grant — known as the "Welsh tract," embracing over 173,000 
acres on the Great Pedee (Marion County) 62 under headrights 
of fifty acres, also a bounty in provisions, tools, and livestock. 
These attempts, east of the fall line, are interesting as show- 
ing the colonial policy of marking out towns (which were to be 
politically-organized parishes, with representation in the legis- 
lature), and attracting foreigners thereto, prior to the coming 
of settlers from the North. 

Georgia 

The settlement of Georgia, in 1732, completed the southern 
line of colonization toward the Piedmont. Among the objects 
of the colony, as specified in the charters, were the relief of the 
poor and the protection of the frontiers. To guard against the 
tendency to engross the lands in great estates, already so clearly 
revealed in the older colonies, the Georgia trustees provided that 
the grants of fifty acres should not be alienated or divided', but 
should pass to the male heirs and revert to the trustees in case 
heirs were lacking. No grant greater than five hundred acres 
was permitted, and even this was made conditionally upon the 
holder settling ten colonists. However, under local conditions 
and the competition and example of neighboring colonies, this 
attempt to restrict land tenure in the interest of democracy 
broke down by 1750, and Georgia's land system became not 
unlike that of the other Southern colonies. 63 

In 1734, Salzburgers had been located above Savannah, and 
within seven years some twelve hundred German Protestants 
were dwelling on the Georgia frontier; while a settlement of 
Scotch Highlanders at Darien, near the mouth of the Altamaha, 
protected the southern frontier. At Augusta, an Indian trad- 
ing fort (1735), whence the dealers in peltry visited the Chero- 
kee, completed the familiar picture of frontier advance. 64 



62 Gregg, Old Cheraws, p. 44. 
" Ballagh, loc. cit, pp. 119, 120. 

M Compare the description of Georgia frontier traders, cattle raisers, 
and land speculators, about 1773, in Bartram, Travels, pp. 18, 36, 308. 

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Resume' of Westward Settlement from the Coast 

We have' now hastily surveyed the movement of the frontier 
of settlement westward from the lowlands, in the later years of 
the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century. 
There is much that is common in the whole line of advance. The 
original settlers engross the desirable lands of the older area. 
Indented servants and new-comers pass to the frontier seeking 
a place to locate their headrights, or plant new towns. Adven- 
turous and speculative wealthy planters acquire large holdings 
in the new areas, and bring over settlers to satisfy the require- 
ments of seating and cultivating their extensive grants, thus 
building up a yeomanry of small landholders side by side with 
the holders of large estates. The most far-sighted of the new- 
comers follow the example of the planters, and petition for in- 
creasingly extensive grants. Meanwhile, pioneers like Abraham 
Wood, himself once an indented servant, and gentlemen like 
Col. William By rd— prosecuting the Indian trade from their 
posts at the "heads" of the rivers, and combining frontier pro- 
tection, exploring, and surveying — make known the more dis- 
tant fertile soils of the Piedmont. Already in the first part of 
the eighteenth century, the frontier population tended' to be a 
rude democracy, with a large representation of Scotch-Irish, 
Germans, Welsh, and Huguenot French settlers, holding relig- 
ious faiths unlike that of the followers of the established church 
in the lowlands. The movement of slaves into the region was 
unimportant, but not unknown. 

Southward Migration through the Valley to Piedmont 

The Virginia Valley was practically unsettled in 1730, as was 
much of its Piedmont area and all of the Piedmont area of the 
Carolinas. The significance of the movement of settlers from 
the North into this vacant valley and Piedmont, behind the area 
occupied by expansion from the coast is, that it was geographi- 
cally separated from the westward movement from the coast, and 
that it was sufficient in volume to recruit the democratic forces 
and postpone for a long time the process of social assimilation 
to the type of the lowlands. 

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As has been pointed out, especially in the Carolinas a belt of 
pine barrens, roughly eighty miles in breadth, ran parallel with 
the fall line and thus discouraged western advance across this 
belt, even before the head of navigation was reached. In Vir- 
ginia, the Blue Ridge made an almost equally eifective barrier, 
walling off the Shenandoah Valley from the westward advance. 
At the same time this valley was but a continuation of the 
Great Valley, that ran along the eastern edge of the Alleghanies 
in. southeastern Pennsylvania, and included in its mountain 
trough the Cumberland and Hagerstown valleys. In short, a 
broad limestone band of fertile soil was stretched within moun- 
tain walls, southerly from Pennsylvania to southwestern Vir- 
ginia : and here the watergaps opened the way to descend to the 
Carolina Piedmont. This whole area, a kind of peninsula 
thrust down from Pennsylvania, was rendered comparatively 
inaccessible to the westward movement from the lowlands, and 
was equally accessible to the population which was entering 
Pennsylvania. 60 

Thus it happened that from about 1730 to 1760 a generation 
of settlers poured' along this mountain trough into the southern 
uplands, or Piedmont, creating a new continuous social and 
economic area, which cut across the artificial colonial boundary 
lines, disarranged the regular extension of local government 
from the coast westward, and built up a new Pennsylvania in 
contrast with the old Quaker colonies, and a new South in con- 
trast with the tidewater South. This New South composed the 
southern half of the Old West. 

Pennsylvania Germans 

From its beginning, Pennsylvania was advertised as a home 
for dissenting sects seeking freedom in the wilderness. But it 
was not until the exodus of German redemptioners, 66 from about 
1717, that the Palatinate and neighboring areas sent the great 
tide of Germans which by the time of the Revolution made them 
nearly a third of the total population of Pennsylvania. It has 



85 See Willis, "Northern Appalachians," in Physiography of the U. S. 
in National Geog. Soc. Monographs (N. Y., 1895), no. 6. 

"" Diffenderfer, "German Immigration into Pennsylvania," in Pa. 
German Soc. Proa, v, p. 10; Redemptioners (Lancaster, Pa., 1900). 

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The Old West 

been carefully estimated that in 1775 over 200,000 Germans 
lived in the thirteen colonies, chiefly along the frontier zone of 
the Old West. Of these, a hundred thousand had their home in 
Pennsylvania, mainly in the Great Valley, in the region which 
is still so notably the abode of the "Pennsylvania Dutch." 67 

Space does not permit us to describe this movement of colon- 
ization. 68 The entrance to the fertile limestone soils of the 
Great Valley of Pennsylvania was easy, in view of the low ele- 
vation of the South Mountain ridge, and the watergaps thereto. 
The continuation along the similar valley to the south, in 
Maryland and Virginia, was a natural one, especially as the 
increasing tide of emigrants raised the price of lands. 69 In 
1719 the proprietor's price for Pennsylvania lands was ten 
pounds per hundred acres, and two shillings quit-rents. In 
1732 this became fifteen and one-half pounds, with a quit-rent 
of a half penny per acre. 70 During the period 1718 to 1732, 
when the Germans were coming in great numbers, the manage- 
ment of the lands fell into confusion, and many seated them- 
selves as squatters, without title. 71 This was a fortunate 
possibility for the poor redemptioners, who had sold their serv- 
ice for a term of years in order to secure their transportation to 
America. 

By 1726 it was estimated that there were 100,000 squatters ; 72 
and of the 670,000 acres occupied between 1732 and' 1740, it is 
estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without grants. 78 



" A. B. Faust, in his MS. monograph which won the Conrad Seipp 
prize for the best study of the German element in the United States. 

88 See the bibliographies in Kuhns, German and Swiss Settlements of 
Pennsylvania (N. Y., 1901) ; Wayland, German Element of the Shenan- 
doah Valley (N. Y. 1908); Channing, United States, ii, p. 421; Griffin, 
List of Works relating to the Germans in the U. S. (Library of Con- 
gress, Wash., 1904). 

••See in illustration, the letter in Myers, Irish Quakers (Swarth- 
more, Pa., 1902), p. 70. 

T0 Shepherd, Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania (N. Y., 1896), 
p. 34. 

"Gordon, Pennsylvania (Phila., 1829), p. 225. 

n Shepherd, loc. cit., pp. 49-51. 

"Ballagh, Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1897, pp. 112, 113. Compare 
Smith, St. Clair Papers (Cincinnati, 1882), ii, p. 101. 

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Nevertheless these must ultimately be paid for, with interest, 
and the concession of the right of preemption to squatters made 
this easier. But it was not until 1755 that the governor offered 
land free from purchase, and this was to be taken only west of 
the Alleghanies. 74 

Although the credit system relieved the difficulty in Pennsyl- 
vania, the lands of that colony were in competition with the 
Maryland lands, offered between 1717 and 1738 at forty shillings 
sterling per hundred acres, which in 1738 was raised to five 
pounds sterling. 75 At the same time, in the Virginia Valley, as 
will be recalled, free grants were being made of a thousand acres 
per family. Although large tracts of the Shenandoah Valley 
had been granted to speculators like Beverley, Borden, and the 
Carters, as well as to Lord Fairfax, the owners sold six or seven 
pounds cheaper per hundred acres than did the Pennsylvania 
land office. 76 Between 1726 and 1734, therefore, the Germans 
began to enter this valley, 77 and' before long they extended their 
settlements into the Piedmont of the Carolinas, 78 being recruited 
in South Carolina by emigrants coming by way of Charleston — 
especially after Governor Glenn's purchase from the Cherokee 
in 1755, of the extreme western portion of the colony. Between 
1750 and the Revolution, these settlers in the Carolinas greatly 
increased in numbers. 

Thus a zone of almost continuous German settlements had 
been established, running from the head of the Mohawk in New 
York to the Savannah in Georgia. They had found the best 
soils, and they knew how to till them intensively and thriftily, 
as attested by their large, well-filled barns, good stock, and big 



u Shepherd, loc. cit., p. 50. 

n Mereness, Maryland (N. Y., 1901), p. 77. 

n Calendar Ya. State Papers (Richmond, 1875), 1, p. 217; on these 
grants see Kemper, "Early Westward Movement in "Virginia" in Va. 
Mag., xii and xiii; Wayland, "German Element of the Shenandoah Val- 
ley," William and Mary College Quarterly, iii. The speculators, both 
planters and new-comers, soon made application for lands beyond the 
Alleghanies. 

"In 1794 the Virginia House of Delegates resolved to publish the 
most important laws of the state in German. 

n See Bernheim, German Settlements in the Carolinas (Phila., 1872) ; 
Clewell, Wachovia; Allen, German Palatines in N. C. (Raleigh, ] 

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canvass-covered Conestoga wagons. They preferred to dwell in 
groups, often of the same religious denomination — Lutherans, 
Reformed, Moravians, Mennonites, and many lesser sects. The 
diaries of Moravian missionaries from Pennsylvania, who visited 
them, show how the parent congregations kept in touch with 
their colonies 79 and how intimate, in general, was the bond of 
connection between this whole German frontier zone' and that of 
Pennsylvania. 

Scotch-Irish 

Side by side with this German occupation of Valley and Pied- 
mont, went the migration of the Scotch-Irish. 80 These lowland 
Scots had been planted in Ulster early in the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Followers of John Knox, they had the contentious in- 
dividualism and revolutionary temper that seem natural to 
Scotch Presbyterianism. They were brought up on the Old' 
Testament, and in the doctrine of government by covenant or 
compact. In Ireland their fighting qualities had been revealed 
in the siege of Londonderry, where their stubborn resistance 
balked the hopes of James II. However, religious and political 
disabilities were imposed upon these Ulstermen, which made 
them discontented, and hard times contributed to detach them 
from their homes. Their movement to America was contem- 
poraneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolu- 
tion, it is believed' that a third of the population of Pennsylvania 
was Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too lib- 
erally, that a half million came to the United States between 
1730 and 1770. 81 Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large 
numbers of Highlanders came to increase the Scotch blood in 



"See Wayland, loc. cit., bibliography, for references; and especially 
Ya. Mag., xi, pp. 113, 225, 370, xii, pp. 55, 134, 271; German American 
Annals, N. S. iii, pp. 342, 369, iv, p. 16; Clewell, Wachovia; N. G. Colon. 
Records, v, pp. 1-14. 

80 On the Scotch-Irish, see the bibliography in Green, "Scotch-Irish 
in America," Amer. Antiquarian Soc. Proceedings, April, 1895; Hanna, 
Scotch-Irish (N. Y., 1902), is a comprehensive presentation of the 
subject; see also Myers, Irish Quakers. 

M Fiske, Old Virginia (Boston, 1897), ii, p. 394. Compare Linehan, 
The Irish Scots and the Scotch-Irish (Concord, N. H., 1902). 

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the nation. 82 Some of the Scotch-Irish went to New England. 83 
Given the cold shoulder by congregational Puritans, they passed 
to unsettled lands about Worcester, to the frontiers in the 
Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at Londonderry — 
whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French and 
Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as 
well as the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. The 
frontier college of Dartmouth was Presbyterian in its origin. 
In New York, a Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the 
frontier at Cherry Valley. 84 Scotch Highlanders came to the 
Mohawk, 85 where they followed Sir William Johnson and be- 
came Tory raiders in the Revolution. 

But it was in Pennsylvania that the centre of Scotch-Irish 
power lay. "These bold and indigent strangers, saying as 
their excuse when challenged for titles that we had solicited 
for colonists and they had come accordingly," 89 and asserting 
that "it was against the laws of God and nature that so much 
land should be idle while so many christians wanted it to work / 
on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant lands, es- 
pecially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and 
Maryland, and' remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. 
Finding the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they 
planted their own outposts along the line of the Indian trad- 
ing path from Lancaster to Bedford ; they occupied Cumberland 
Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the Juniata somewhat be- 
yond the narrows, spreading out along its tributaries, and' by 
1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country to avoid 
Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their settle- 
ments made Pittsburg a centre from which was to come a new 
era in Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and Ger- 
man fur-traders 87 whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio 
Valley in the days before the French and Indian wars. The 



M See MacLean, Scotch, Highlanders in America (Cleveland, 1900). 

83 Hanna, Scotch-Irish, ii, pp. 17-24. 

"Halsey, Old New York Frontier (N. Y., 1901). 

"MacLean, pp. 196-230. 

M The words of Logan, Penn's agent, in 1724, in Hanna, ii, pp. 60, 63. 

,T Winsor, Mississippi Basin (Boston, 1895), pp. 238-243. 



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The Old West 

messengers between civilization and savagery were such men 88 
as the Irish Croghan, and the Germans Conrad Weiser and 
Christian Post. 

Like the Germans, the Scotch-Irish passed' into the Shenan- 
doah Valley, 89 and on to the uplands of the South. In 1738 
a delegation of the Philadelphia Presbyterian synod was sent 
to the Virginia governor and received assurances of security of 
religious freedom; the same policy was followed by the Caro- 
linas. By 1760 a zone of Scotch-Irish Presbyterian churches 
extended from the frontiers of New England to the frontiers 
of South Carolina. This zone combined in part with the Ger- 
man zone, but in general Scotch-Irishmen tended to follow 
the valleys farther toward the mountains, to be the outer 
edge of this frontier. Along with this combined frontier 
stream were English, Welsh and Irish Quakers, and French 
Huguenots. 90 

Among this moving mass, as it passed along the Valley into 
the Piedmont, in the middle of the eighteenth century, were 
Daniel Boone, John Sevier, James Robertson, and the ancestors 
of John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stone- 
wall Jackson, James K. Polk, Sam Houston, and Davy Crockett ; 
while the father of Andrew Jackson came' to the Carolina Pied- 
mont at the same time from the coast. Recalling that Thomas 
Jefferson's home was in this frontier, at the edge of the Blue 
Ridge, we perceive that these names represent the militant ex- 
pansive movement in American life. They fortell the settle- 
ment across the Alleghanies in Kentucky and Tennessee'; the 
Louisiana Purchase, and Lewis and Clark's transcontinental ex- 
ploration ; the conquest of the Gulf Plains in the War of 1812- 
15 ; the annexation of Texas ; the acquisition of California and 
the Spanish Southwest. They represent, too, frontier democracy 



88 See Thwaites, Early Western Travels (Cleveland, 1904-06), i; 
Walton, Conrad Weiser (Phila., 1900) ; Heckewelder, Narrative (Phila., 
1820). 

89 Christian, Scotch-Irish Settlers in the Valley of Virginia (Rich- 
mond, 1860). 

90 Roosevelt gives an interesting picture of this society in his Win- 
ning of the West (N. Y., 1889-96), i, chap, v; see also his citations, es- 
pecially Doddridge, Settlements and Indian Wars (Wellsburgh, W. Va., 
1824). 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

in its two aspects personified in Andrew Jackson and Abraham 
Lincoln. It was a democracy responsive to leadership, sus- 
ceptible to waves of emotion, of a "high religious voltage" — 
quick and direct in action. 

The volume of this Northern movement into the Southern up- 
lands is illustrated by the statement of Governor Tryon, of 
North Carolina, that in the summer and winter of 1765 more 
than a thousand immigrant wagons passed through Salisbury, 
in that colony. 91 Coming by families, or groups of families or 
congregations, they often drove their flocks with them. Whereas 
in 1746 scarce a hundred fighting men were found in Orange 
and the western counties of North Carolina, there were in 1753 
fully three thousand, in addition to over a thousand Scotch in 
the Cumberland; and they covered the province more or less 
thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains. 92 
Bassett remarks that the Presbyterians received their first min- 
isters from the synod of New York and Pennsylvania, and later 
on sent their ministerial students to Princeton College. "In- 
deed it is likely that the inhabitants of this region knew more 
about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or Eden- 
ton." 93 

Results 

We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some 
of the results of the occupation of this new frontier during the 
first half of the eighteenth century — some of the consequences 
of this formation of the Old West. 

I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line 
from New England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French 
and Indian attacks and gave indispensable service during the 
Revolution. The significance of this fact could only be devel- 
oped by an extended survey of the scattered border warfare of 
this era. We should have to see Rogers leading his New Eng- 
land Rangers, and Washington defending interior Virginia 
with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French and 
Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of 



n Bassett, in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1894, p. 145. 
**N. G. Colon. Records, v, pp. xxxix, xl; cf. p. xxl. 
n Loc. cit., pp. 146, 147. 

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Canada, Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York 
(Oriskany, Cherry Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the 
Iroquois), Wyoming Valley, western Pennsylvania, the Virginia 
Valley, and the back country of the South are considered as a 
whole from this point of view, the meaning of the Old West will 
become more apparent. 

II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials 
from the colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic, 
self-sufficing, primitive agricultural society, in which individu- 
alism was more pronounced than the community life' of the 
lowlands. The indented servant and the slave were not a 
normal part of its labor system. It was engaged in grain and 
cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a partial 
means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which 
it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already push- 
ing farther on ; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to 
the small farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle 
country. It was a region of hard work and' poverty, not of 
wealth and leisure. Schools and churches were secured under 
serious difficulty, 94 if at all; but in spite of the natural tend- 
encies of a frontier life, a large portion of the interior showed 
a distinctly religious atmosphere. 

III. The Old West began that movement of internal trade 
which developed home markets and diminished that colonial 
dependence on Europe in industrial matters, shown by the 
maritime and staple-raising sections. Not only did Boston and 
other New England towns increase as trading centres when the 
back country settled up, but an even more significant inter- 
change occurred along the Valley and Piedmont. The German 
farmers of the Great Valley brought their woven linen, knitted 
stockings, firkins of butter, dried apples, grain, etc., to Phila- 
delphia and especially to Baltimore, which was laid out in 1730. 
To this city also came trade from the Shenandoah Valley, and 

94 See the interesting account of Rev. Moses Waddell's school in South 
Carolina, on the upper Savannah, where the students, including 
John C. Calhoun, McDuffe, Legare, and Petigru, were educated in the 
wilderness. They lived in log huts in the woods, furnished their own 
supplies, or boarded near by, were called to the log school-house by 
horn for morning prayers, and then scattered in groups to the woods 
for study. Hunt, Calhoun (Phila., 1907), p. 13. 
15 [ 219 ] 



Wisconsin Historical Society 

even from the Piedmont came peltry trains and droves of cattle 
and hogs to the same market. 9 * The increase of settlement on 
the upper James resulted in the establishment of the city of 
Richmond at the falls of the river in 1737. Already the tobacco- 
planting aristocracy of the lowlands were finding rivals in the 
grain-raising area of interior Virginia and Maryland. Charles- 
ton prospered as the up-country of the Carolinas grew. Writ- 
ing in the middle of the eighteenth century, Governor Glenn, 
of South Carolina, explained the apparent diminution of the 
colony's shipping thus: 06 

Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, drain- 
ing us of all the little money and bills that we could gather from 
other places, for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things 
of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to- 
supply us with which are settled with very industrious and conse- 
quently thriving Germans. 

It was not long before this interior trade produced those 
rivalries for commercial ascendancy, between the coastwise cit- 
ies, which still continue. The problem of internal improvements 
became a pressing one, and the statutes show increasing pro- 
vision for roads, ferries, bridges, river improvements, etc. 97 
The basis was being laid for a national economy, and at the 
same time a new source for foreign export was created. 

IV. The Old West raised the issues of nativism and a lower 
standard of comfort. In New England, Scotch-Irish Presby- 
terians had been frowned upon and pushed away by the Puritan 
townsmen. 98 In Pennsylvania, the coming of the Germans and 
the Scotch-Irish in such numbers caused grave anxiety. Indeed, 
a bill was passed to limit the importation of the Palatines, but 
it was vetoed. 03 Such astute observers as Franklin feared in 
1753 that Pennsylvania would be unable to preserve its language 



M Scharf, Maryland (Baltimore, 1879), ii, p. 61, and chaps, i and 
xviii; Kercheval, The Valley. 

" Weston, Documents, p. 82. 

• T See, for example, Phillips, Transportation in the Eastern Cotton 
Belt, pp. 21-53. 

9s Hanna, Scotch-Irish, ii, pp. 19, 22-24. 

"Cobb, Story of the Palatines (Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 1897), p. 300, cit- 
ing Penn. Colon. Records, iv, pp. 225, 345. 

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The Old West 

and that even its government would become precarious. 1 "I 
remember," he declares, "when they modestly declined inter- 
meddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry 
all before them, except in one or two counties;" and he la- 
mented that the English could not remove their prejudices by 
addressing them in German. fl Dr. Douglass 3 apprehended that 
Pennsylvania would "degenerate into a foreign colony" and en- 
danger the quiet of the adjacent provinces. Edmund Burke, 
regretting that the Germans adhered to their own schools, liter- 
ature, and language, and that they possessed great tracts with- 
out admixture of English, feared that they would not blend 
and become one people with the British colonists, and that the 
colony was threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign. 
He also noted that "these foreigners by their industry, frugal- 
ity, and a hard way of living, in which they greatly exceed our 
people, have in a manner thrust them out in several places." 4 
This is a phenomenon with which a succession of later frontiers 
has familiarized us. In point of fact the "Pennsylvania 
Dutch" remained through our history a very stubborn area to 
assimilate, with corresponding effects upon Pennsylvania politics. 
It should be noted also that this coming of non-English 
stocks to the frontier raised in all the colonies affected, ques- 
tions of naturalization and land tenure by aliens. 5 

Struggle of the West Against the East 

V. The creation of this frontier society — of which so large a 
portion differed from that of the coast in language and religion 
as well as in economic life, social structure, and ideals — pro- 
duced an antagonism between interior and coast, which worked 
itself out in interesting fashion. In general this took these 
forms: contests between the property-holding class of the coast 
and the debtor class of the interior, where specie was lacking, 



1 Works (Bigelow ed.), ii, pp. 296-299. 

'Ibid., iii, p. 297; cf. p. 221. 

'Summary (1755), ii, p. 326. 

« European Settlements (London, 1793), ii, p. 200 (1765); cf. Frank- 
lin, Works (N. Y., 1905-07), ii, p. 221, to the same effect. 

"Proper, "Colonial Immigration Laws," in Columbia Univ. Studies, 
xii. [ 221 ] 



Wisconsin Historical Society 

and where paper money and a readjustment of the basis of 
taxation were demanded; contests over defective or unjust 
local government in the administration of taxes, fees, lands, 
and the courts; contests over unfair apportionment in the legis- 
lature, whereby the coast was able to dominate, even when its 
population was in the minority; contests to secure the complete 
separation of church and state; and, later, contests over slavery, 
internal improvements, and party politics in general. These 
contests are also intimately connected with the political philoso- 
phy of the Revolution and with the development of American 
democracy. In nearly every colony prior to the' Revolution, 
struggles had been in progress between the party of privilege, 
chiefly the Eastern men of property allied with the English au- 
thorities, and the democratic classes, strongest in the West and 
the cities. 

This theme deserves more space than can here be allotted to 
it ; but a rapid survey of conditions in this respect, along the 
whole frontier, will at least serve to bring out the point. 

In New England as a whole, the contest is less in evidence. 
That part of the friction elsewhere seen as the result of defect- 
ive local government in the back country, was met by the ef- 
ficiency of the town system; but between the interior and the 
coast there were struggles over apportionment and religious 
freedom. The former is illustrated by the convention that met 
in Dracut, Massachusetts, in 1776, to petition the states of 
Massachusetts and New Hampshire to relieve the financial dis- 
tress and unfair legislative representation. Sixteen of the bor- 
der towns of New Hampshire sent delegates to this convention. 
Two years later, these New Hampshire towns attempted to join 
Vermont. 6 As a Revolutionary state, Vermont itself was an 
illustration of the same tendency of the interior to break away 
from the coast. Massachusetts in this period witnessed a cam- 
paign between the paper money party which was entrenched in 
the more recently and thinly-settled areas of the interior and 
west, and the property-holding classes of the coast. 7 The op- 



•Libby, "Distribution of the Vote on the Federal Constitution," 
Univ. of Wis. Bulletin, pp. 8, 9, and citations. Note especially New 
Hampshire State Papers, x, pp. 228 et seq. 

T Libby, loc. cit., pp. 12-14, 46, 54-57. 

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The Old West 

position to the constitutions of 1778 and 1780 is tinctured with 
the same antagonism between the ideas of the newer part of the 
interior and of the coast. 8 Shay's Rebellion and the' anti-fed- 
eral opposition of 1787-88 found its stronghold in the same in- 
terior areas. 9 

The religious struggles continued until the democratic inter- 
ior, where dissenting sects were strong, and where there was 
antagonism to the privileges of the congregational church, 
finally secured complete disestablishment in New Hampshire, 
Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But this belongs to a later 
period. 10 

Pennsylvania affords a clear illustration of these sectional 
antagonisms. The memorial of the frontier "Paxton Boys," in 
1764, demanded a right to share in political privileges with the 
older part of the colony, and protested against the apportion- 
ment by which the counties of Chester, Bucks, and Philadelphia, 
together with the city of Philadelphia, elected twenty-six 
delegates, while the five frontier counties had but ten. 11 The 
frontier complained against the failure of the dominant Quaker 
party of the coast to protect the interior against the Indians. 13 
The three old wealthy counties under Quaker rule feared the 
growth of the West, therefore made few new counties, and care- 
fully restricted the representation in each to preserve the ma- 
jority in the old section. At the same time, by a property 
qualification they met the danger of the democratic city popula- 
tion. Among the points of grievance in this colony, in addi- 
tion to apportionment and representation, was the difficulty of 
access to the county seat, owing to the size of the back counties. 
Dr. Lincoln has well set forth the struggle of the back country, 
culminating in its triumph in the constitutional convention of 



•Farrand, in Yale Review, May, 1908, p. 52 and citation. 

•Libby, loc. cit. 

10 See Turner, Rise of the New West (Amer. Nation series, N. Y„ 
1906), pp. 16-18. 

"Parkman, Pontiac (Boston, 1851), ii, p. 352. 

12 Shepherd, "Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania," in Columbia 
Univ. Studies, vi, pp. 546 et seg. Compare Watson, Annals, ii, p. 259; 
Green, Provincial America (Amer. Nation series, N. Y., 1905), p. 234. 



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Wisconsin Historical Society • 

1776, which was chiefly the work of the Presbyterian counties. 18 
Indeed, there were two revolutions in Pennsylvania, which went 
on side by side: one a revolt against the coastal property-hold- 
ing classes, the old dominant Quaker party, and the other a 
revolt against Great Britain, which was in this colony made 
possible only by the triumph of the interior. 

In Virginia, as early as 1710, Governor Spotswood had com- 
plained that the old counties remained small while the new ones 
were sometimes ninety miles long, the inhabitants being obliged 
to travel thirty or fourty miles to their own court-house. Some 
of the counties had 1,700 tithables, while others only a dozen 
miles square had 500. Justices of the peace disliked to ride 
forty or fifty miles to their monthly courts. Likewise there 
was disparity in the size of parishes — for example', that of 
Varina, on the upper James, had nine hundred tithables, many 
of whom lived fifty miles from their clmrch. But the vestry 
refused to allow the remote parishioners to separate, because it 
would increase the parish levy of those that remained. He 
feared lest this would afford "opportunity to Sectarys to es- 
tablish their opinions among 'em, and thereby shake that happy 
establishment of the Church of England which this colony en- 
joys with less mixture of Dissenters than any other of her 
Ma j 'tie's plantations, and when once Schism has crept into the 
Church, it will soon create faction in the Civil Government." 

That Spotswood '3 fears were well founded, we have already 
seen. As the sectaries of the back country increased, dissat- 
isfaction with the established church grew ; until in the Revo- 
lution, Patrick Henry and Jefferson, with the back country be- 
hind them, were able to destroy the establishment, and to break 
down the system of entails and primogeniture behind which 
the tobacco-planting aristocracy of the coast was entrenched. 
The desire of Jefferson to see slavery gradually abolished and 
popular education provided, is a further illustration of the' at- 
titude of the interior. In short Jeffersonian democracy, with 
its idea of separation of church and state, its wish to popular- 
ize education, and its dislike for special privilege, was deeply 
affected by the Western society of the Old Dominion. 



18 Lincoln, Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania (Boston, 1901) ; 
McMaster and Stone, Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution (Lan- 
caster, 1888). 

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The Old West 

The Virginian reform movement, however, was unable to re- 
dress the grievance of unequal apportionment. In 1780 Jeffer- 
son pointed out that the practice of allowing each county an 
equal representation in the legislature gave control to the 
numerous small counties of the tidewater, while the large popu- 
lous counties of the up-country suffered. "Thus," he wrote, 
"the 19,000 men below the falls give law to more than 30,000 
living in other parts of the state, and appoint all their chief 
officers, executive and judiciary." 14 This led to a long strug- 
gle between coast and interior, terminated only when the slave 
population passed across the fall line, and more nearly assim- 
ilated coast and' up-country. In the mountain areas which did 
not undergo this change, the independent state of West Virginia 
remains as a monument of the contest. In the convention of 
1829-30, the whole philosophy of representation was discussed, 
and the coast defended its control as necessary to protect 
property from the assaults of a numerical majority. They 
feared that the interior would tax their slaves in order to se- 
cure funds for internal improvements. 

As Doddridge put the case : 15 

The principle is that the owners of slave property must be possessed 
of all the powers of government, however small their own numbers 
may be, to secure that property from the rapacity of an overgrown 
majority of white men. This principle admits of no relaxation, be- 
cause the weaker the minority becomes, the greater will their need for 
power be according to their own doctrines. 

Leigh of Chesterfield county declared : 16 

It is remarkable — I mention it for the curiosity of the fact — that if 
any evil, physical or moral, arise in any of the states south of us, It 
never takes a northerly direction, or taints the Southern breeze; 
whereas, if any plague originate in the North, it is sure to spread to 
the South and to invade us sooner or later: the influenza — the small 



14 Notes on Virginia. See his table of apportionment in Ford, Writ- 
ings of Thomas Jefferson, iii, p. 222. 

"Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-1880 (Richmond, 
1854), p. 87. These debates constitute a mine of material on the 
difficulty of reconciling the political philosophy of the Revolution with 
the protection of the property, including slaves, of the lowland planters. 

M Loc. cit., p. 407. The italics are mine. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

pox — the varioloid — the Hessian fly — the Circuit Court system — Uni- 
versal Suffrage — all come from the North, and they always cross above 
the falls of the great rivers: below, it seems, the broad expanse of 
waters interposing, effectually arrests their progress. 

Nothing could more clearly bring out the sense of contrast 
between upland and lowland Virginia, and the continued in- 
timacy of the bond of connection between the North and its 
Valley and Piedmont colonies, than this unconscious testimony. 

In North and South Carolina the upland South, beyond the 
pine barrens and the fall line, had similar grievances against 
the coast; but as the zone of separation was more strongly 
marked, the grievances were more acute. The tide of back- 
woods settlement flowing down the Piedmont from the north, 
had cut across the lines of local government and disarranged the 
regular course of development of the colonies from the sea- 
coast. 17 Under the common practice, large counties in North 
Carolina and parishes in South Carolina had been projected 
into the unoccupied interior from the older settlements along 
their eastern edge. 

But the Piedmont settlers brought their own social order, and 
could not be well governed by the older planters living far to- 
ward the seaboard settlements. This may be illustrated by con- 
ditions in South Carolina. The general court in Charleston 
had absorbed county and precinct courts, except the minor jur- 
isdiction of justices of the peace. This was well enough for the 
great planters who made their regular residence there for a 
part of each year; but it was a source of oppression to the up- 
country settlers, remote from the court. The difficulty of 
bringing witnesses, the delay of the law, and the costs all re- 
sulted in the escape of criminals as well as in the immunity of 
reckless debtors. The extortions of officials, and their occa- 
sional collusion with horse and cattle thieves, and the lack of 
regular administration of the law, led the South Carolina up- 
country men to take affairs in their own hands, and in 1764 to 
establish associations to administer lynch law under the name 
of "Regulators." The " Scovillites, " or government party, and 
the Regulators met in arms on the Saluda in 1769, but hostilities 
were averted and remedial measures passed, which alleviated 



"McCrady, South Carolina, 1119-1116, p. 623. 

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The Old West 

the difficulty until the Revolution. 18 There still remained, how- 
ever, the grievance' of unjust legislative representation. 19 Cal- 
houn stated the condition in these words: 

The upper country had no representation in the government and no 
political existence as a constitutent portion of the state until a period 
near the commencement of the revolution. Indeed, during the revolu- 
tion, and until the formation of the present constitution, in 1790, its 
political weight was scarcely felt in the government, even then al- 
though it had become the most populous section, power was so dis- 
tributed under the constitution as to leave it in a minority in every 
department of government. 

Even in 1794 it was claimed by the up-country leaders that 
four-fifths of the people were governed by one-fifth. Nor was 
the difficulty met until the constitutional amendment of 1808, 
the effect of which was to give the control of the senate to the 
lower section and^of the house of representatives to the upper 
section, thus providing a mutual veto. 20 This South Carolina 
experience furnished the historical basis for Calhoun's argu- 
ment for nullification, and for the political philosophy under- 
lying his theory of the "concurrent majority." 21 This adjust- 
ment was effected, however, only after the advance of the black 
belt toward the interior had assimilated portions of the Pied- 
mont to lowland ideals. 

When we turn to North Carolina's upper country we find the 
familiar story, but with a more tragic ending. The local of- 
ficials owed their selection to the governor and the council 
whom he appointed. Thus power was all concentrated in the 
official "ring" of the lowland area. The men of the' interior 
resented the extortionate fees and the poll tax, which bore with 
unequal weight upon the poor settlers of the back country. This 



"Brevard, Digest of S. C. Laws, i, pp. xxiv, 253; McCrady, South 
Carolina, 1719-1776, p. 637; Schaper, "Sectionalism in South Carolina," 
in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1900, i, pp. 334-338. 

"Schaper, loc. cit., pp. 338, 339; Calhoun, Works (N. Y., 1851-59), I, 
p. 402; Columbia (S. C.) Gazette, Aug. 1, 1794; Ramsay, South Carolina, 
pp. 64-66, 195, 217; Elliot, Debates, iv, pp. 288, 289, 296-299, 305, 309, 
312. 

20 Schaper, loc. cit., pp. 400-437 et seq. 

21 Turner, Rise of the New West, pp. 50-52, 331; Calhoun, Works, 1, 
pp. 400-405. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

tax had been continued after sufficient funds had been collected 
to extinguish the debt for which it was originally levied, but 
venal sheriffs had failed to pay it into the treasury. A report 
of 1770 showed at least one defaulting sheriff in every county 
of the province.-' 2 This tax, w T hich was almost the sole tax of 
the colony, was to be collected in specie, for the warehouse sys- 
tem, by which staples might be accepted, while familiar on the 
coast, did not apply to the interior. The specie was exceed- 
ingly difficult to obtain ; in lack of it, the farmer saw the 
sheriff, who owed his appointment to the dominant lowland 
planters, sell the lands of the delinquent to his speculative 
friends. Lawyers and court fees followed. 

In short, the interior felt that it was being exploited, 23 and 
it had no redress, for the legislature was so apportioned that 
all power rested in the old lowland' region. Efforts to secure 
paper money failed by reason of the governor's opposition un- 
der instructions from the crown, and the currency was contract- 
ing at the very time when population was rapidly increasing in 
the interior. 24 As in New England, in the days of Shay's Re- 
bellion, violent prejudice existed against the judiciary and the 
lawyers, and it must, of course, be understood that the move- 
ment was not free from frontier dislike of taxation and the re- 
straints of law and order in general. In 1766 and 1768, meet- 
ings were held in the upper counties to organize the opposition, 
and an "association" 25 was formed, the members of which 
pledged themselves to pay no more taxes or fees until they 
satisfied themselves that these were agreeable to law. 



**N. C. Colon. Records, vii, pp. xiv-xvii. 

18 See Bassett, "Regulators of N. C." in Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 
1894, pp. 141 (bibliog.) et seq.; N. C. Colon. Records, pp. vii-x (Saunder's 
introductions are valuable) ; Carutbers, Dr. David Caldwell (Greens- 
borough, N. O, 1842); Waddell, Colonial Officer (Raleigh, 1890); M. 
De L. Haywood, Governor William Tryon (Raleigh, N. 0, 1903) ; Clewell, 
Wachovia, chap, x; W. E. Fitch, Some Neglected History of N. C. (N. 
Y., 1905); L. A. McCorkle and F. Nash, in N. C. Booklet (Raleigh, 
1901-07), iii; Wheeler, North Carolina, ii, pp. 301 et seq.; Cutter, 
Lynch Law, chaps, ii and iii. 

"Bassett, loc. cit., p. 152. 

28 Wheeler, North Carolina, ii, pp. 301-306; N. C. Colon. Records, vii, 
p. 251, 699. 

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The Old West 

The Regulators, as they called themselves, assembled in 
the autumn of 1763 to the number of nearly four thousand, and 
tried to secure terms of adjustment. In 1770 the court-house 
at Hillsboro was broken into by a mob. The assembly passed 
some measures designed to conciliate the back country ; but be- 
fore they became operative, Governor Tryon's militia, about 
twelve hundred men, largely from the lowlands, and led by the 
gentry whose privileges were involved, met the motley army of 
the Regulators, who numbered about two thousand, in the bat- 
tle of the Alamance (May, 1771). Many were killed and 
wounded, the Regulators dispersed, and over six thousand men 
came into camp and took the oath of submission to the colonial 
authorities. The battle was not the first battle of the Revolu- 
tion, as it has been sometimes called, for it had little or no re- 
lation to the stamp act ; and mauy of the frontiersmen involved, 
later refused to fight against England because' of the very 
hatred which had been inspired for the lowland Revolutionary 
leaders in this battle of the Alamance. The interior of the 
Carolinas was a region where neighbors, during the Revolution, 
engaged in internecine conflicts of Tories against Whigs. 

But in the sense that the battle of Alamance was a conflict 
against privilege, and for equality of political rights and power, 
it was indeed a preliminary battle of the Revolution, although 
fought against many of the very men who later professed Revo- 
lutionary doctrines in North Carolina. The need of recogniz- 
ing the importance of the interior led to concessions in the con- 
vention of 1776 in that state. "Of the forty-four sections of 
the constitution, thirteen are embodiments of reforms sought 
by the Regulators." 26 But it was in this period that hundreds 
of North Carolina backwoodsmen crossed the mountains to 
Tennessee and Kentucky, many of them coming from the heart 
of the Regulator region. They used the device of "associa- 
tions ' ' to provide for government in their communities. 27 

In the matter of apportionment, North Carolina showed the 
same lodgment of power in the hands of the coast, even after 
population preponderated in the Piedmont. 28 



28 N. C. Colon. Records, viii, p. xix. 
"Turner, in Amer. Hist. Review, i, p. 76. 
*N. C. Colon. Records, vii, pp. xiv-xxiv. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

It is needless to comment on the uniformity of the evidence 
which has been adduced', to show that the Old West, the in- 
terior region from New England to Georgia, had a common 
grievance against the coast; that it was deprived throughout 
most of the region of its due share of representation, and neg- 
lected and oppressed in local government in large portions of 
the section. The familiar struggle of West against East, of 
democracy against privileged classes, was exhibited along the 
entire line. The phenomenon must be considered as a unit, not 
in the fragments of state histories. It was a struggle of interior 
against coast. 

VI. Perhaps the most noteworthy contribution in the Revo- 
lutionary era, aside from the military aspects already mentioned', 
was in the part which the multitude of sects in the Old West 
played in securing the great contribution which the United' 
States made to civilization by providing for complete religious 
liberty a secular state with free churches. Particularly the 
Revolutionary constitutions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, un- 
der the influence of the back country, insured religious freedom. 
The efforts of the North Carolina upland area to secure a similar 
result were noteworthy, though for the time ineffective. 29 

VII. As population increased in these years, the coast grad- 
ually yielded to the up-country's demands. This may be illus- 
trated by the transfer of the capitals from the lowlands to the 
fall line and Valley. In 1779, Virginia changed her seat of gov- 
ernment from Williamsburg to Richmond; in 1790. South Caro- 
lina, from Charleston to Columbia; in 1791, North Carolina, from 
Edenton to Raleigh ; in 1797, New York, from New York City to 
Albany ; in 1799. Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia to Lancaster. 

VIII. The democratic aspects of the new constitutions was 
also influenced by the frontier as well as by the prevalent Revolu- 
tionary philosophy ; and the demands for paper money, stay 
and tender laws, etc., of this period were strongest in the inter- 



58 Weeks, Church and State in North Carolina (Baltimore, 1893); N. 
C. Colon. Records, x, p. 870; Curry, Establishment and Disestablishment 
(Phila., 1889); C F. James, Documentary History of the Struggle for 
Religious Liberty in Virginia (Lynchburg, Va., 1900) ; Semple, The 
Virginia Baptists (Richmond, 1810) ; Amer. Hist. Assoc. Papers, ii, p. 
21, iii, pp. 205, 213. 

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The Old West 

ior. It was this region that supported the turbulence of the 
area in New England, where Shay's Rebellion occurred; it was 
(with some important exceptions) the same area that resisted 
the ratification of the federal constitution, fearful of its stronger 
government and of the loss of paper money. 

IX. The interior later showed its opposition to the coast by 
the persistent contest against slavery, carried on in the up- 
country of Virginia, and North and South Carolina. Until 
the decade 1830-40, it was not certain that both Virginia and 
North Carolina would not find some means of gradual abolition. 
The same influence accounts for much of the exodus of the Pied- 
mont pioneers into Indiana and Illinois, in the first half of the 
nineteenth century. 30 

X. These were the regions, also, in which were developed the 
desires of the pioneers who crossed the mountains, and settled 
on the ''Western waters, " to establish new states, free from 
control by the lowlands, owning their own lands, able to deter- 
mine their own currency, and in general to govern themselves 
in accordance with the ideals of the Old West. They were 
ready also, if need be, to become independent of the old thir- 
teen. Vermont must be considered in this aspect, as well as 
Kentucky and Tennessee. 

XI. The land system of the Old West furnished precedents 
which developed into the land system of the trans-Alleghany 
West. 31 The squatters of Pennsylvania and the Carolinas found 
it easy to repeat the operation on another frontier. Pre-emption 
laws became established features. The Revolution gave oppor- 
tunity to confiscate the claims of Lord' Fairfax, Lord Granville, 
and McCulloh to their vast estates, as well as the remaining 
lands of the Pennsylvania proprietors. The 640 acre (or one 



10 See Ballagh, "Slavery in Virginia," Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, 
extra, xxiv; Bassett, "Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North 
Carolina," Id., xiv, pp. 169-254; Bassett, "Slavery in the State of North 
Carolina," Id., xvii; Bassett, "Antislavery Leaders in North Carolina," 
Id., xvi; Weeks, "Southern Quakers," Id., xv, extra; Schaper, "Sec- 
tionalism in South Carolina," Amer. Hist. Assoc. Report, 1900; Turner, 
Rise of the New West, pp. 54-56, 76-78, 80, 90, 150-152. 

n Hening, x, p. 35 ; Public Acts of N. C, i, pp. 204, 306 ; Revised Code 
of Ya., 1819, ii, p. 357; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, i, p. 261, ii, 
pp. 92, 220. 

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Wisconsin Historical Society 

square mile) unit of North Carolina for pre-emptions, and 
frontier land bounties, became the area awarded to frontier 
stations by Virginia in 1779, and the "section" of the later 
federal land system. The Viriginia pre-emption right of four 
hundred acres on the Western waters, or a thousand for those 
who came prior to 1778, was, in substance, the continuation of 
a system familiar in the Old West. 

The grants to Beverley, of over a hundred thousand acres in 
the Valley, conditioned on seating a family for every thousand 
acres, and the similar grants to Borden, Carter, and Lewis, were 
followed by the great grant to the Ohio Company. This com- 
panj% including leading Virginia planters and some frontiers- 
men, asked in 1749 for two hundred thousand acres on the up- 
per Ohio, conditioned on seating a hundred families in seven 
years, and for an additional grant of three hundred thousand 
acres after this should be accomplished. It was proposed to 
settle Germans on these lands. 

The Loyal Land Company, by order of the Virginia council 
(1749), was authorized to take up eight hundred thousand 
acres west and north of the southern boundary of Virginia, on 
condition of purchasing "rights" for the amount within four 
years. The company sold many tracts for £3 per hundred acre's 
to settlers, but finally lost its claim. The Mississippi Company, 
including in its membership the Lees, Washingtons, and other 
great Virginia planters, applied for two and one-half million 
acres in the west in 1769. Similar land companies of New Eng- 
land origin, like the Susquehanna Company and Lyman's Missis- 
sippi Company, exhibit the same tendency of the Old West on 
the northern side. New England's Ohio Company of Associates, 
which settled Marietta, had striking resemblances to town pro- 
prietors. 

These were only the most noteworthy of many companies of 
this period, and it is evident that they were a natural outgrowth 
of speculations in the Old West. Washington, securing military 
bounty land claims of soldiers of the French and Indian War, 
and selecting lands in West Virginia until he controlled over 
seventy thousand acres for speculation, is an excellent illustra- 
tion of the tendency. 32 lie also thought of colonizing German 



32 Adams, in Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies, iii, pp. 55 et seq. 

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The Old West 

Palatines upon his lands. The formation of the Transylvania 
and' Vandalia com- nies were natural developments on a still 
vaster scale. 38 

XII. The final phase of the Old West, which I wish merely to 
mention, in conclusion, is its colonization of areas beyond the 
mountains. The essential unity of the movement is brought out 
by a study of how New England's Old West settled northern 
Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Adirondacks, central 
and western New York, the Wyoming Valley (once organized 
as a part of Litchfield, Connecticut), the Ohio Company's region 
about Marietta, and Connecticut's Western Reserve on the 
shores of Lake Erie ; and how the pioneers of the Great Valley 
and the Piedmont region of the South crossed the Alleghanies 
and settled on the Western Waters. Daniel Boone, going from 
his Pennsylvania home to the Yadkin, and from the Yadkin to 
Tennessee and Kentucky, took part in the whole process, and 
later in its continuation into Missouri. 34 The social conditions 
and ideals of the Old West powerfully shaped those of the trans- 
Alleghany West. 

The important contrast between the spirit of individual col- 
onization, resentful of control, which the Southern frontiersmen 
showed, and the spirit of community colonization and control 
to which the New England pioneers inclined, left deep traces 
on the later history of the West. 35 The Old West diminished 
the importance of the town as a colonizing unit, even in New 
England. In the Southern area, efforts to legislate towns into 
existence, as in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, failed. 
They faded away before wilderness conditions. But in general, 
the Northern stream of migration was communal, and the South- 
ern individual. The difference which existed between that por- 
tion of the Old West which was formed by the northward col- 
onization, chiefly of the New England Plateau (including New 
York), and that portion formed by the southward colonization 
of the Virginia Valley and the Southern Piedmont was reflected 
in the history of the Middle West and the Mississippi Valley. 



""Alden, New Governments West of the Alleghanies (Madison, 1897), 
gives an account of these colonies. 
"Thwaites, Daniel Boone (N. Y., 1902). 
* Turner, In Alumni Quarterly of the University of Illinois, 11, 133-136. 

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